Rutan Pond Racer

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Rutan Pond Racer
FGAddon
At 300 mph
At 300 mph
The pilot views the engines and the gear coming down
The pilot views the engines and the gear coming down
Type Racing aircraft, Historical aircraft
Configuration Twin boom aircraft
Propulsion Piston aircraft, Twin-engine aircraft
Manufacturer Scaled Composites
Author(s) Emmanuel Baranger (3D, FDM)
FDM YASim
--aircraft= pond
Status Beta
 FDM Stars-3.png
 Systems Stars-1.png
 Cockpit Stars-2.png
 Model Stars-4.png
Development
 Hangar Helijah hangar
 Website The website for the Rutan Pond Racer developments.
 Repository The development repository of the Rutan Pond Racer.
Download Download the Rutan Pond Racer aircraft package for the current stable release (2020.3).
License GPLv2+

The Rutan Pond Racer was a racing aircraft intended to create a new category of racing aircraft for the Reno air races. It was powered by two automobile engines developing 1000 hp each, but in practice never reached full power.

Review

Errors in loading

The Pond racer does not load in FG 3 without editing the pond.xml? and pilot.xml files that have some non standard French characters in the comments sections. Simply delete the relevant words and the problem disappears. Line 146 column 11 is where it all starts.

Flying

Flying this high performance aircraft was bound to be fraught with danger: starting with the usual magneto and and S key, the engines got up to speed fast, and the aircraft hurtled down the runway. Directional control was somewhat difficult to achieve, but climbing at 100mph and cruising at 300 at least was an experience. It was not difficult to fly, and handled quite well, even in high speed turns. The autopilot promptly rolled and crashed it, and pausing the sim was an opportunity to demonstrate how well one can handle an uncontrollable high speed roll.

Landing was another adventure, approaching at 200 mph for good measure, I bounced twice, no three times, and ran off the end of the runway, nose tipped over into the tarmac due to heavy application of the tail dragger that was now dragging its nose rather than its tail. One has to be careful with the brakes.

Gallery